This is the second episode of the “Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other Tuesday, the IEPS posts a new show with Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Julie Murphy from Sage Communications.
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On today’s show, Julie shared insights on how marketing organizations can develop better content to help the sales process flow. Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership president Gina Stracuzzi also appeared on today’s show.
Find Julie on LinkedIn.
JULIE’S TIP: “Good content will strengthen trust. Your customer will think, ‘These guys know what I need. They’re answering my questions. I’m excited about it. I’m learning—and they’re the experts.’
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Gina, we’re going to be talking to Julie here. We have a couple of great questions teed up. You and I talk about this all the time. Before we bring on Julie, what are some of your thoughts on why this is so important?
Gina Stracuzzi: Times have just changed, let’s face it. Buyers are looking for more than just a sales pitch. They really want to know what makes you so different than the other five companies I have on my list, because I’ve been doing my own education, and you have a small sliver of time in order to give them something they really need and want. They don’t care who’s got the best sales pitch. They want to know who’s responsible for what is going to help me and how is it relevant to what I need done. You have to be working with your sales team so intently these days. You just cannot leave it to chance.
Fred Diamond: Today we’re going to be talking about content, and we’re going to be talking about high quality content and why that’s more important than ever. Julie, why is high quality content so important right now than really ever before, in a world where buyers self-educate sometimes before they even reach out to sales?
Julie Murphy: I was so glad that you picked this topic, Fred, because it’s so important in the self-education process that buyers often do before they’ll even meet with the sales rep. I know when we talked about that on the first podcast, we got that huge outpouring on LinkedIn and other commentary that both marketers and sales execs alike feel pretty strongly about wanting to break down these silos between marketing and sales, and how can we better collaborate.
To your question on how do you define high quality content, I would define it as effectiveness, which is obviously part of our name, quality content that’s effective, and it’s also relevant. I think a lot of people actually get really hung up on maybe they feel like they’re not the best writer, they’re hung up on poetic phrasing, or I have to be really clever or creative. While those things are important, it’s important to have really quality writing with great tone.
What’s more important than that, what’s more important than poetic phrasing is having relevant content that’s effective. It’s about the right topic, and it’s answering the questions that your customers or potential customers have about your offering or about this space in general. I think personally that’s most effective, and we can talk about that in a variety of ways.
I would say bad content, if we want to look at the flip side of that, is good content will strengthen trust. Your customer will think, “These guys know what I need. They’re answering my questions, I’m excited about it. I’m learning and they’re the experts.” Bad content, I would define that as being irrelevant content which wastes everyone’s time, and it also can cause the buyer to question, “Does this company understand me? Do they understand what my values are? Do they understand what my real challenge is?” For better or for worse, content can really strengthen your reputation or it can cause some damage if you don’t do it correctly.
Fred Diamond: Gina, Julie mentioned trust, and that’s a word that comes up all the time, and we do a lot of work with partnership leaders. What are some of your thoughts on that?
Gina Stracuzzi: Julie drives home some really important points there. The markets are saturated with all kinds of messaging from marketers. Trust is the big differentiator. If you don’t have high-quality insight-driven content that really garners their attention and makes it worth their while, you’re going to lose out a lot, because they want education, not ads. Because now everything AI is just flooding the market, people are using it right and left, myself included, but you have to be careful how you use it. The buyers know what’s going on. To Julie’s point you, it can’t be just words for words. It has to bring something that’s going to make them trust you as a seller, as an organization. I think her points are so well taken.
Fred Diamond: You made a good point there, Gina, that there’s been so much noise. We, at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we produce a lot of content. We’re well over 760 Sales Game Changers Podcasts, and we’re proud of all of it. Then how we slice it up and how we put it up on YouTube and LinkedIn and various places. Julie, how do you get through the noise? If a company wants to improve their content and truly make it valuable for the customer that they’re trying to influence, where should they start?
Julie Murphy: The first place you should start as a company is obviously in conversations with your sales team, which we talked about quite a bit in our first podcast. You’re right, there is so much noise out there and you have to be able to cut through that noise with relevant content. That starts with making sure you’re talking topically about what’s going to be most important to your buyer. That’s a closed feedback loop with the sales team. They should be letting you know what collateral pieces are working, what’s not, what do they actually want to take with them to a meeting, or for the top end awareness building piece, the thought leadership piece, what sort of topics are getting their customer’s attention, that’s really going to help build credibility. That’s what I would say from an initial standpoint.
The other thing that you want to do, say you’re brand new to a company and they’ve put you in charge of the content program, the first thing you have to do is get organized. Whether you’re a huge company with a lot of content assets, or you’re a small company with maybe just a handful, you need to know what you have. The first step is to really do a content audit and do a gap assessment so you understand, what do I have? Because a lot of times companies build their content piecemeal and it’s with good intentions. Maybe you have a really important meeting with a specific customer and you built something for them, and that’s great, it should be customized for that customer, but then it’s sort of a hodgepodge of content.
You want to take a look at who am I really selling to? What are all the different audiences that I’m talking to? Does my content speak to all those audiences, or what pieces am I missing? That’s one. Then of course, what we had just talked about is making sure you’re getting with the sales team to make sure that, because a lot of times the marketing people aren’t in your meetings, so they don’t know what the customer objections are, or how that conversation is going. Being able to provide that feedback allows us to make the content even better.
Fred Diamond: Gina, what would be your advice to sales professionals? You run the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership. You facilitate the Women in Sales Leadership Forum. Matter of fact, the next one starts July 11th this summer, succession program for women in sales leaders at companies like Amazon Web Services, Hilton, Oracle, Cvent, Carahsoft, et cetera. What do you think a sales professional wants to say to marketing about the content that they’re producing?
Gina Stracuzzi: It’s interesting because there was a period where it was all about brevity. Because people’s attention is really short, you can’t put anything too long out there. It has to be consumed in three seconds or you’ve lost them kind of thing. It really did a disservice in many ways to what is really impactful about that company that could help their buyers. It’s got to be that you’ve used both, that you use that little micro content, but it leads to others things like case studies and blog posts and frameworks and things like that. Then taking into account, maybe you use ROI calculators or decision guides, anything, like personal video outreaches is huge, and buyers do respond to that, but sales needs marketing to build that for them. They really have to be working together to say, “The client really seemed to respond to this. Let’s do a little bit more,” not only making it that, but adding it to your list of things that they’re responding to. You’ve got to have that feedback from marketing or from sales, and then sales has to appreciate that marketing needs that feedback in order to move forward.
Fred Diamond: You raise a great point here. Most of the people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, again, we’re doing today’s Marketing and Selling Effectiveness, are in complex markets, typically business to business, business to government. There is a transactional part, but to get to the opportunity to have the transactions, it might take 2, 3, 4, 5 years. A lot of the content is critical through the flow. One thing that, Gina, you and I have talked about a bunch is marketing used to do marketing, and then sales would come in. Now through the buyer’s journey, sales needs help like earlier and marketing needs to come in earlier and later. The whole process is not as defined as it once was.
Julie, in B2B and B2G sales, where sales cycles are long and decision teams are potentially in the dozens, how should content be tailored to support the complex buying journeys?
Julie Murphy: I think you just hit the nail on the head that sometimes the teams can be dozens. Think about it in terms of it’s not one individual buyer. It’s a committee that you’re selling to. A lot of times people on that committee have different needs and expertise. Sometimes you need to speak to the technical person who’s actually going to maybe be using the product and making recommendations. You need to talk to the business-minded person that’s looking at the numbers and the ROI. A lot of times, especially in government, you’re working with the procurement teams, and so you have to have content that addresses each of these audiences to make sure you’re speaking to everyone. That’s the first thing.
The other thing is, is it’s really important not to sell too hard in the beginning. I think we know this, what we call old school selling, which is the hard sell right up front. We know that buyers now do so much education on the front end, that on the early part of this, it’s a lot of thought leadership, it’s a lot of education, looking at trends in the industry. The other thing that you can do over long buying cycles is maybe there’s a particular deadline, say a federal mandate where agencies need to meet a particular requirement by timeframe, and you happen to have an offering that’s going to help them with it. You can do a large campaign and warm up the market as you lead up to that deadline.
It’s having a long-term strategy where in the front end it’s a lot of education. Then as you get down the funnel and they’re closer to making a decision, that’s when they might dive into a white paper or some of the more longer form content where they really want to learn before making a decision. It’s about having different content pieces every step of the journey. Gina, you also mentioned the videos and the diversified content of social media and the short form, and those are also especially important at the front end of that sales journey.
Gina Stracuzzi: Yes. I agree.
Fred Diamond: I like the way you said committee. As I’m thinking about this, you, you’re right, there’s the technical, there’s the financial buyer, there’s the program buyer, there’s the IT buyer in a lot of these situations, and government, B2G. Then of course you have the whole contract side and the compliance side, and there’s so many regulations that come into play that your company needs to communicate. Maybe you do a webcam or a podcast on how we specifically address this compliance issue that is going to be a showstopper if we don’t have.
Gina, I think this is a good time to transfer into the AI discussion. I know you’re a big advocate for AI and how it works in the selling process. Let’s talk about the evolving role of AI and ongoing change your buyer behavior. We also do a complimentary, every other week, we do a podcast called Marketing and Selling Effectiveness. Every other week we do the AI and selling Effectiveness with Zeev Wexler for Viacry, where we go deep into this. But I’m curious, Gina, start us off with your thoughts on this, and then Julie, what are your clients expecting and asking you for?
Gina Stracuzzi: What I’m hearing from a lot of people that I speak with is AI can really help everyone. Even if somebody’s searching for a company that does X, AI can help them curate what they’re looking for and give them let’s say 10 ideas on companies. When they go to your website off of that, you’ve got to be ready, because their first impression of you is going to be based on what AI put up to them to begin with. It’s important because it shapes every piece of what the buyer sees now. You have to be ready on all fronts for this.
Really, you have to think about how from a seller standpoint, great content when generated by AI that’s going to pop up first to them can really either build trust or shatter trust right from the start. You really have to be careful about what you’re putting up and what’s being gathered through AI. That’s really what I’ve been hearing people talk about, because they grab old stuff sometimes and you don’t even know it’s there and it’s like, “Oh, that’s very old. I don’t know where you got that.” You really have to think about all these things now.
Fred Diamond: Julie, how are you interfacing with your many clients in this particular vein?
Julie Murphy: I can maybe look at it through two different lenses. One is maybe how marketing and sales teams can use it for content. That’s probably one of the ways that a lot of people have started using GenAI or trying it, is through the content engines. There’s a lot of positive to that, the number one probably being speed that you can very quickly release a blog post. It puts out pretty good content, but I would say the one thing that I think is really important is providing context. You want to make sure that you don’t come across too robotic and that you’re really checking what the GenAI is giving back to you, because beyond just hallucinations, you want to make sure that your messaging is on brand. You do still need that human that’s editing the work.
Also, my other piece of advice, whenever I use AI, you guys would probably laugh at my prompts because they’re like a full paragraph. You just want to give context as possible because the more you give AI, the more customized it’s going to be for you. What you don’t want to start doing is put out generic posts because generic posts or inauthenticity erodes trust, which we know is really important, especially in this marketplace. That’s what I would say in terms of playing around with GenAI and using it for editing or for writing.
The other piece of it, to your point, Gina, a lot of times people are going to AI first before they do anything else to do their research. Do you know why? Because, I even personally love the way it comes back to me, it comes back in bullets, very easy to read. Going back to what we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast, is writing in a way that’s effective. It doesn’t have to be the most poetic, it has to be clear and it’s got to be relevant. A lot of times, that’s what AI is doing. If you write that way both on your website and your other materials, it’s more likely to actually pull that content.
Fred Diamond: This our second Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast. This has been great. For our listeners, we’re very excited with where we’re going to go with this. We’re going to get deeper and deeper and deeper into this topic. We’re going to bring on some leaders, people who are really doing the integration of sales and marketing well, who are ahead of the curve. We’re looking forward to that in future shows.
Here’s how I want to wrap up today’s podcast. I’m going to ask you both the same question, but slightly different. Julie, the question for you is, what do sales leaders need to know about what marketing is going through with content? If you were at a coffee shop or something and someone knows who you are and they’re like, “Gee, what is marketing’s biggest challenge? I’m a sales leader. What do I need to know about what marketing’s going through?”
Gina, I’m going to ask you the converse question. If a marketing director or marketing leader or VP said to you, “Gina, I know you run the Global Women in Sales, the Center for Elevating Women in Sales Leadership, what are the biggest challenges that sales leaders are faced with right now?” When you have that empathy and the understanding, it definitely makes work happen a lot better. Julie, why don’t you take it first, and then Gina, you’ll bring us home.
Julie Murphy: I like how you frame that, that it’s really good to understand each other. I think a lot of times when sales leaders have challenges with marketers with the content, it’s in regard to this piece of content didn’t get me any immediate leads. It’s not lead-gen-focused enough, which a lot of times that content, as we know, is further down the funnel. A lot of sales leaders are aware of this, but we’re trying to bring everyone on board of just the importance of thought leadership early on in the process because a lot of times that type of content, it might not bring you an immediate lead, but it’s helping to shape the market. It’s helping to get you on the short list. It’s helping to bring credibility to your buyers so that way when they’re actually ready to call they want to call you.
I would say just the purpose of each type of content, understanding what the strategic value is for each, both in terms of the front end more thought leadership that might not be driving immediate leads, but will help you down the road for this very long complex sale, as well as the content that you get further down the funnel. Then the reverse, I would also say for sales leaders, if they feel like the marketing content really isn’t helping them, then you do need to have a conversation to better understand what’s happening in those meetings that you’re unaware of, so that way you can help make it better.
Fred Diamond: Like you said last week on your final bit of advice, was meet for coffee. You got to be talking in person these days. We keep pushing that. Thanks, Julie. Gina, bring us home. Give us your final thought on what do marketing leaders need to know what sales leaders and sales professionals are dealing with right now?
Gina Stracuzzi: To bring home a lot of what we talked about, quality content, it’s not just for lead generation. It’s what sellers send. The best content can really shorten the sales cycle, build trust, and position reps as advisors rather than order-takers. The bottom line really is that if sales and marketing teams aren’t strategizing together, they’re potentially creating friction for the buyers who are seeing one thing in the marketing, but hearing something else from sales, which is already, to your point, Julie, eroding trust. That’s going to leave revenue on the table. It’s got to be a real compromising, working together situation. It can be the salesperson’s competitive edge if it’s done right.
Fred Diamond: Once again, Gina, I want to thank you, Julie Murphy, thank you so much. This is the Marketing and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo